Israel targets Jerusalem home of imprisoned Palestinians with demolition order

Israeli courts issued a demolition order on Thursday against a house in occupied East Jerusalem’s Issawiya neighborhood, the family home of three Palestinians currently imprisoned by Israel, according to the official Palestinian government news agency Wafa.

Um Tareq al-Issawi, the mother of three Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons, told Wafa she received a demolition notice for their house under the pretext of lacking an Israeli-issued building permit.

Al-Issawi said she considered the decision to be a political measure of revenge on the family and an attempt to break the spirits of her imprisoned children.

Her three children are all held in Israeli prisons: Samer, a former hunger-striker who went on one of the longest strikes in history for 266 days, was imprisoned numerous times and most recently released in 2013 before being rearrested in 2014; Shireen, a prominent Palestinian lawyer, and her brother Madhat were sentenced last year to four and five years in prison respectively, after both were accused of being in contact with Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons and providing them with funds, which Israel considers “terrorism.”

Daniel Sidelman, director of the Israeli nonprofit Jerusalem Terrestrial, told Ma’an the al-Issawi family were “not being paranoid” for believing their home was targeted by Israel as a form of revenge, adding that the reasons behind the Israeli government deciding to issue or carry out a demolition remained a mystery.

Since Israeli forces occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967, less than 4,500 Palestinian-owned structures in East Jerusalem have been approved for construction permits, according to Sidelman, while between 2010 and 2014 only 1.5 percent of Palestinian applicants in Area C of the West Bank — areas of the West Bank under full Israeli army jurisdiction — were issued permits, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Israel’s discriminatory permit regime has left the majority of Palestinians with no choice but to build illegally.

There are hundreds of thousands of outstanding demolition orders against Palestinian homes and buildings as Israeli authorities consider the overwhelming majority of Palestinian structures to be illegal,Sidelman highlighted, adding that it was unclear what procedure the Israeli government used to decide when to carry out a demolition.

However, Sidelman told Ma’an that at times it was very clear that demolitions had been carried out in order for Israeli authorities to “settle the score” with families who have children held in Israeli prisons.

Since the start of 2016, Israeli forces have demolished 586 Palestinian-owned structures, leaving 800 Palestinians homeless in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, according to OCHA.

According to the Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolitions, Israeli forces have demolished over 48,000 Palestinian homes and structures since the start of the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967. 

SOURCE: MA’AN NEWS